Why Email Archiving is Essential (and not the same as backup)

If your job depended on it, could you clearly explain — right this moment — the principal differences between email backup and email archiving? If not, don’t worry: You’re in good company. In fact, a 2011 IDC study found that 57% of IT managers use backup processes to meet mission-critical data needs that would actually be satisfied only with an email archiving solution. Additionally, a recent Google-sponsored study found that at least 60% of businesses do not have an efficient solution for email archiving (with many incorrectly assuming their backup processes serve the same purpose as archiving email).

Regulatory issues remain a key reason for implementing email archiving. Indeed, complying with regulators is often the primary reason businesses keep and store so much of their data in the first place. As IDC also found in its research, corporate data doubles every year, and half of businesses maintain their structured data for seven years or longer.

But with the rapid growth of data and intellectual property gathering on organizations’ servers, personal computers and mobile devices — combined with employees’ ever-increasing need to access this from data everywhere, at all times — today the stronger case for email archiving is for its many workflow and business-intelligence benefits, rather than merely addressing regulatory concerns.

This email archiving whitepaper will discuss the differences between data backup and archiving, the reasons archiving should be considered mission-critical at your organization, and why a cloud-based hosted service is the most efficient and cost-effective method of email archiving.